BECOME A MASTER OF THE SURVEY

Once you have learned how to use an autoresponder, it is time to learn how to get your email marketing started. One thing that you can do repeatedly for your customers is find out what they are looking for before you even have a product to offer to them. If you ask your customers what they want you will have a ready-made base to offer your products to of people who have already told you what they would like to have. This is where the survey comes in.

Creating a survey is a good thing for an email marketer to do periodically to find out what their customers are thinking. They can give you valuable information. The first thing you want to do is encourage your customers to fill out your survey. You can do this by offering a free gift as an incentive. You will also need to keep your surveys short, no more than 20 questions, otherwise your customers will become fed up and leave your survey. Clearly state that you will not use their names in the results of your surveys; this will further encourage your customers to fill out your survey knowing that their personal information will not be used for anything. To encourage participation the survey should also be easy to fill out. Yes and no questions are good as well as multiple choices with the answers written for the survey taker. When you would like to offer your customers a chance to add any thoughts they may have, you can add space for comments. Following these steps should help you create a short and simple survey that will be answered willingly.

How do you begin to send out surveys to people? This is another thing that can be automated so that you do not have to set it up yourself and physically send out surveys whenever you need to find out what your customers are thinking. When you use an online company for your survey campaign, you will send an email to your customers inviting them to click on the link in the email that will send them to the survey. You will then receive the answers in your inbox. This can be done very inexpensively with companies on the internet. One of these companies is called Survey Console which has the option of a free account that will give you a limited amount (2) of surveys to send out. There are two choices if you decide to purchase a paid account; the Web Professional will cost $15.00 per month and the Corporate Edition will cost $99.00 per month.

Sending out surveys and discovering what people are looking for and thinking about can be an easy thing to do. Follow the steps in this article and you can become a survey marketer who does research before marketing and producing a product. This can lead to many more sales than you ever imagined.

Read List Management Services to learn how to conduct an email marketing campaign.

THE MYSTERY OF THE AUTORESPONDER SOLVED

In the last post we introduced the concept of the opt-in email list. Enacting the opt-in will require an autoresponder which will automatically receive the name and email address from your prospects and send the first email with a confirmation link. In this post we will explore everything you need to know about the autoresponder and how to make it work for you.

The autoresponder can make running your email campaign a lot easier than if you tried to do everything yourself. Before we go into how this works, let’s look into what an autoresponder does. You may have come in contact with the autoresponder before. If you have ever typed your name and email address into someone’s sign up form and were directed to your email to click on a confirmation link, you have been introduced to an autoresponder. After you clicked enter on the sign-up form the autoresponder was the entity that sent the first message to your inbox. When you go to your email to click the confirmation link to give them permission to send you an email newsletter, for example, you will send it back to the autoresponder.

A further convenience of the autoresponder is being able to program it send out emails on a set schedule. In our example of the newsletter you may have signed up for, the email marketer set the autoresponder to send new editions of the newsletter at specific dates. Suppose you are to receive a new edition of the newsletter four times a month. The autoresponder can be set to send out the newsletter every Monday. All the email marketer has to do is program the autoresponder with the date for each newsletter and leave the autoresponder to send them out. No further participation is required. Every Monday your newsletter shows up in your inbox because of the autoresponder.

With the last post helping you to grow your list and this post teaching you about how to use an autoresponder, you should be able to begin an effective email marketing campaign. The list that you will continuously build will be the list that you can market to repeatedly with the help of your autoresponder. This strategy has shown great success for email marketers, so if you can begin with a sign-up form and begin setting up your autoresponder you may experience similar success.

For software that will help you properly format your emails there is the eMail Format Pro

For more great advice on how to manage an mail list read List Management Secrets

DON’T WIMP OUT BY BUYING AN EMAIL LIST

To begin an email marketing campaign, you are going to need a list of names and email addresses. This will be a list that you promote to over and over again. Hopefully, these people will buy from you over and over again and remain loyal customers. This is the best case scenario for a beginning email marketer.

How do you build an email list? There are different ways to do this. One way is to buy a list of names from an online company and it can cost you various amounts of money, but it may not be worth the effort. When you buy a list of names to market to with your products you can buy such a large list that you may do well selling your products. But, this list will not be targeted toward your particular products. It would amount to working harder than you need to with this large list because this list of names has not been introduced to your brand of products. You will need to start at the beginning explaining about your products and not everyone on your list will be interested in what you are promoting.

To prevent owning a list of 500,000 names of people who are not necessarily interested in your products, you must refrain from buying your list from one of the many online companies that sell email lists. Following this advice will give you a targeted list that you build yourself, with fewer names of people who actually would like to receive the information that you will be sending them through email. Some people on this list will buy products from you. This experience will encourage them to buy other products and maybe give you testimonials, further building up your credibility. Having a smaller list in the beginning will help you to manage your list better than the large lists you can buy and you will become more trustworthy to these fewer people.

To build your list you will want them to enter their names and email addresses into your database. You can offer them a place to do this on your website. A good idea is to make it an opt-in process. With the opt-in email your prospects enter their names and email addresses and an email is sent to their email address. They must click on the link provided to confirm their permission for you to send them email. You must have come across this tactic before; it is very common and a great tactic that will lower the possibility of being accused of spamming your prospects. Be sure to have something valuable to offer your prospects, such as a newsletter and coupons for a percentage off of your products. There must be a good reason to join your list.

Building your own list by offering an opt-in form on your website will take you some time, but it will be a much more valuable list than if you bought it from someone because you will have a list of people who are truly interested in your products.

List Management Secrets contains more great advice on how to run an email campaign.

Email Format Pro will format your emails so that they will pass the spam test.